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Emily Alford

Migrants in Genderland

By Emily Alford


Back in January, the TG Forum Bulletin Board carried a week-long discussion on how one might explain transgender to somebody who just did not know. A lot of sparky ideas were put forward, Perhaps surprisingly, nobody picked up on Kate Bornstein's metaphor of being a GENDER OUTLAW. Maybe we're too conformist (as some our critics say) to accept the idea of outlawry. But outlaws like Robin Hood, Maid Marion, the (genuinely crossdressing) Joan of Arc, and even Billy the Kid do have a way of becoming culture heroes. Maybe Kate will too.

In the meantime, I want to propose another possibility, based on a terrific new book that I've just read. As the disclaimers go, the spin I put is entirely mine, and the book's author bears no responsibility at all. But that's how it goes with writing: cast something out upon the public and there is no guarantee at all as to what some reader will do with it.

The book is STRANGERS AMONG US by Roberto Suro (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). It's about the most thoughtful thing I've ever seen on the undoubted crisis that the United States now faces with immigration from its south. Suro is Latino himself, so he cannot be accused of hysteria or hostility. On the contrary, he is deeply sympathetic toward the migrants who fill his pages. But he is no knee-jerk fool. He recognizes that very major problems of culture and politics and economics and loyalties and identity need confronting.

What Suro has to say on the politics and future of his own subject is irrelevant here. Maybe I've already convinced some people to buy it. If so, great. What's of interest in this place is how his thinking bears on the situation of all the people who may finding themselves reading this. Migration is a complex phenomenon. Something must be terribly wrong "at home" for a person ever to consider leaving. Something must be very attractive about the goal for a person to consider going there. That much is common place. It's called push/pull theory, and it's not much of a theory, as theories go.

Suro's breakthrough is to take his readers right into the agonizing choices of the people he came to know as he worked on the book. Some have no doubt: leave the old behind and embrace the new. But most find themselves caught. Sometimes it's between the desire to return, finally. Migrants who go back successful can feel vindicated for having left because leaving has made it all so much better, for themselves and for the others who count in their lives. Sometimes people find themselves caught in what Suro calls "the channel," which means the in-between existence with which they've had come to terms. Sometimes the result is being caught between what the migrant thought was the perfect, final adaptation to the new situation and the unexpected consequences that it has produced. As Suro describes it, the matter is never easy.

Suro contrasts migrants, who are his heroes, with mere victims. Drawing on the famous poem at the Statue of Liberty, he suggests that people who migrate are not "teeming refuse" at all. Instead, they have rejected the idea that they must accept the victimhood of fate, and have tried to do something about what fate has done to them. His heroes and heroines are doers, refusers, hell-no-ers.

Like push-pull, that much may be commonplace. But Suro's heroines and heroes do not necessarily end up where they want to be or even where they expected to be. Emotionally or geographically, the journey that begins in Puebla does not necessarily end in Anaheim, or Boyle Heights, or East LA. And that is where the metaphor of migration seems to me to work for the subject here.

How does the migrant metaphor apply to us, the transgendered? One easy answer comes from people who literally have migrated in space to find the chance to have the bodies and the social roles they've always wanted. They truly have left the old behind, all of it, jobs, names, families, histories, genders, identities. They are complete migrants, born in a place and situation to manhood or womanhood, as culture and society define these things, but rejecting it all for the sake of self-recognition, or self-choice. In the simplest sense, a gender migrant lives one role and situation and perhaps identity behind and adopts another, entirely. Like any migration that process means loss, sometimes terrible loss. But the committed migrant faces that problem and decides that yes, this must be, if I am to be what i can become. That's no different, at all, from leaving Sicily for Brooklyn, or Oaxcaca for Los Angeles.

But that misses the power of Suro's imagery, his recognition of the strength of what most migrant leave behind and the hold of the left-behind upon the migrants themselves. In his reading migration is not a one-way street, but a field in which people find and act upon many possibilities. The new place and its rewards beckon, but the past and its memories beckon too. So do the loyalties that the past has imprinted, loyalties that a loving person will reject only with great difficulty.

To borrow from another writer, Thomas Wolfe, nobody can go home again, once they've left. But people do try, even if the home to which they thought they were bound is not the same as the home as they finally found. (Yes, I know I'm quoting and punning upon James Fenimore Cooper).

That's precisely where Suro's reading of the migrant experience seems to me to offer the perfect metaphor for us, the people condemned by history or hormones or genes or whatever, to wander between the one homeland called male and the other called female. People who are unquestionably at home with where they grew up cannot comprehend departing. Similarly, people who are just at home with having been born to be a woman or a man possibly can understand what it is to be born the one and to want desperately, in some fashion, to be or at least experience the other.

Migration leads to strange consequences, including the formation of identities that do not exist in in the place the migrant left. Sicilians and Neapolitans and Lombards and Tuscans in Brooklyn all become "Italians." Hondurans and Santo Dominguans and Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and native-born Hispanics en los Estados Unidos all become "Latinos." But no Sicilian can become a Napolitan. Nobody born Irish Catholic can entirely become a Jew, even a Dublin Jew. Our own most intelligent spokes people understand this, and they realize that it isn't the issue. Kate Bornstein writes that she knows she isn't a man and she isn't sure she's a woman either. Deirdre McCloskey comments that nobody who wasn't born a girl, or Italian, can know what is it so be entirely a girl. Or Italian.

That, precisely, speaks to the issue of finding oneself to be transgender. Can I ever, possibly, know what it would have been like if I had been conceived female? Of course not, any more than given my own ancestry I can know what it would have been like to be born in Palermo or Naples. But I can know what it's like to set out towards another shore, whether I end up saying "yes, this is where I belong," as some migrants do, or saying "I like it, but it never can be home," as do others, or, finally, saying, "it's not what I thought it would be, at all, and I'm going back."

All those are migrant experiences. They represent possibilities, not certainties, within the general field of experience of leaving home in order to find something better someplace else. But whatever choice migrants make, they do not buckle under to whatever fate happened to decree. They do not simply remain and and accept and suffer. They work out their own prospects and possiblilties. And if they go back, they return different for having been away.

Migration from place to place, culture to culture means opening a realm of possibilities. It's only a metaphor for the experience of leaving behind the surety of conforming to the role that goes with a person's body of birth. But maybe the metaphor works.



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